White Paper on Technology
Developed by TESOL Technology Advisory Committee (TAC)

Topic: YouTube
URL or URLs: http://www.youtube.com/

Purpose of White Paper:

YouTube is a free online video streaming service that allows anyone to view and share videos that have been uploaded by members. Wikipedia reports the following: “Unregistered users can watch most videos on the site, while registered users are permitted to upload an unlimited number of videos. […] Few statistics are publicly available regarding the number of videos on YouTube. However, in July 2006, the company revealed that more than 100 million videos were being watched every day, and 2.5 billion videos were watched in June 2006. 50,000 videos were being added per day in May 2006, and this increased to 65,000 by July. […] In August 2006, The Wall Street Journal published an article revealing that YouTube was hosting about 6.1 million videos (requiring about 45 terabytes of storage space), and had about 500,000 user accounts. As of February 1, 2008, a YouTube search for "*" returns about 69,000,000 videos, and about 5,120,000 user channels. (February 5, 2008) <citation needed>

Why you need this information:

YouTube is a useful tool for video sharing. Classroom teachers, materials developers and professional organizations can take advantage of the positive aspects and popularity of YouTube to communicate with students and other teachers.

Links to example sites:

ESL channels: The Daily English Show- http://youtube.com/user/thedailyenglishshow
Ebaby English- http://youtube.com/user/ebabyenglish
Groups: English as a Second Language (ESL)- http://youtube.com/group/ESL
Search results for TESOL- http://youtube.com/results?search_query=TESOL&search=Search

How to register
(From YouTube FAQ):
To become a member of YouTube, go to the "Signup" page (http://www.youtube.com/signup), choose a username and password, and enter your information. Then click the "Sign Up" button and you're done.

How to get started (Adapted from YouTube FAQ):
Watching videos: There are lots of ways to find videos to watch. Here are four to start with:
  • If you know what you're looking for, you can type keywords into the Search box at the top of every page.
  • Click on the Videos tab to browse the site; the links across the top give you an idea of what other folks on YouTube find interesting, and you can dig deeper within each one using the Time, Category, and Language links on the left to refine the list of videos.
  • You can also browse the site from the Categories tab to find videos in a more specific area (for example, Education), and refine the list from there using the Search box within the category.
  • When you find other members whose videos you like, you can subscribe to them so that you're notified whenever they upload new videos—the newest four will show up on the home page when you login, or you can view all of your subscriptions to see them all at once.
Uploading Videos:
Once you’ve finished editing your video, made sure it's less than 10 minutes, smaller than 100MB, and in an acceptable format, you're ready to upload it.
  1. Click "Upload Videos" in the upper-right-hand corner of any YouTube page.
  2. Enter as much information about your video as possible, including Title, Description, Tags, and Category. The more information you include, the easier it is for users to find your video!
  3. Determine if you want your video set to Public or Private.
  4. Click the "Upload a Video" button.
  5. In the next window, click the "Browse" button to browse for the video file. Select the file you want to upload.
  6. Click the "Upload Video" button.
It can take from a couple minutes to an hour for your video to upload to YouTube.
If you're receiving an error with your Upload, you might want to make sure you're attempting to upload a file that's recognized by YouTube. YouTube accepts video files from most digital cameras and camcorders, and cell phones in the .AVI, .MOV, .WMV, and .MPG file formats.

Other online video servers: blip.tv, vimeo